After two days of meetings between federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for justice and public safety that were touted as being productive, BC Attorney General Murray Rankin and Minister of Public Safety Mike Farnworth have gotten a commitment from the Federal Government to work towards addressing the issue of prolific offenders.
All of the ministers present at the meeting responded to BC’s calls for federal action by agreeing to an urgent followup meeting with the ministers responsible in that area to consider concrete national proposals to address bail provisions for violent offenders and the challenges of repeat offending.
The government of BC was already acting on several recommendations in a report put out earlier this month about this problem, including the reinstatement of a prolific offender management program.
This problem seems really to originate in December of 2019, when Bill C75 created amendments to the Criminal Code in order to address the disproportionate impacts of the criminal justice system on Indigenous Peoples and racialized people by giving primary consideration to the release of the accused at the earliest reasonable opportunity, as long as the conditions were appropriate for the circumstance.
Later Supreme Court decisions confirmed that pretrial detention is the exception and pretrial release on bail is the rule.
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